Minister of State for Skill Development, Entrepreneurship, Youth Affairs and Sports (Independent Charge), today emphasized the need to re-visit the Minimum Wages Act to align wages to the levels defined in the National Skills Qualification Framework.

"Work
must also commence on developing models for recognition of prior
learning and developing a well-integrated credit framework for the
country," Sarbananda
Sonowal, the minister, said
while inaugurating FICCI's 7th Global
Skills Summit 2014 on the theme 'India's Skill Ecosystem: From
Design to Action'.

The
Minister said that it
was important, through both macro and micro policies to create a pull
factor which attracts and also enforces the people to get skilled to
get into employment or self-employment.

In
Focus

"One
such example could be to include a minimum percentage of certified
skilled work force in the tendering process of every manpower
intensive project and increase the minimum percentage every year by a
reasonable margin based on the life of the project", he said,
adding that at the local level, the industry could enforce it by
ensuring that their ancillary services like drivers, housekeeping and
security and people at the shop floor are certified skilled.

Sonowal
said that for skilling India it was imperative to excite and engage
the youth of the country to participate without inhibitions along
with meeting the local aspirations, demand and conditions.

The
Minister later released the FICCI-KPMG
knowledge paper on 'India's Skill Ecosystem: From Design to
Action' and
the FICCI-NSDC-IFFCO
Foundation report on Skills Development Centre.

Dr.
Jyotsna Suri, Senior Vice President, FICCI, pointed
out that to
achieve the PM's vision developing skills for employability rather
than certificates, "The fundamental requirement is creating an
ecosystem which assigns dignity to vocational education. This would
go a long way in addressing the 'aspirational mismatch' that
majority of our students go through. Unlike the old times where a
degree alone guaranteed job security, in this new generation
'employability' is the key for securing jobs. A massive campaign
is thus required to ensure that our youth, especially women take up
vocational education and technical training as a career choice and
not a chance."

RCM
Reddy, MD & CEO, IL&FS Education and Skills and Chairman,
FICCI Skill Development Forum,
underlined the need for convergence of skill development efforts in
the country and stated that the challenge was to make the Sector
Skills Councils standards acceptable to industry.

The
FICCI-KPMG paper points out that for the creation of a skill
ecosystem, it would be extremely important to have the government's
commitment for labour laws reforms and revisiting minimum wages act
keeping NSQF as base for fixing wages and periodic revision taking
inflation into account and having effective enforcement.

The
FICCI-NSDC-IFFCO
report sets out process guideline for setting up skill development
centre. The guidelines, prepared in the light of real time
experiences witnessed by researchers, incorporate best practices in
skill development across the globe.